S. Stirling - A Meeting At Corvallis

The road curved westward towards the distant Coast Range, dark green slopes whose tops were covered in gray mist that merged into the low clouds. The broad, shallow valley on either side was a patchwork of dormant bare-fingered orchards, peach and apple and cherry, with fleecy white sheep grazing beneath the trees, grainfields showing wet red-brown dirt between the blue-green shoots of the winter wheat, and pasture dotted with Garry oaks and grazing cattle. Workers and herdsmen waved at the troops as they passed, but this close to Larsdalen there weren't any of the usual walled hamlets or fortified A-Lister steadings that dotted the other settled parts of the Outfit's lands; the folk who tilled these lands dwelt inside the Bearkiller citadel. Horsemen and plodding wagons and bicyclists swerved to the side of the road to let the troops pass, and gave cheerful greetings to their friends and relatives as they did.

He took a deep, satisfied breath; he was fairly happy with the way the exercise had gone, and happier still with the way the half-dormant farmlands promised good crops next year. And the way that his folk all looked well fed and warmly clad in new homespun, drab wadmal, or wool and linen and linsey-woolsey colored in yellows and browns, greens and blues, by the dyes they'd learned to make from bark and herbs and leaves. The air was heavy with the musty smell of damp earth and vegetable decay; this season in the Willamette Valley was more like a prolonged autumn with an occasional cold snap than the brutal Siberian winters of the Lake Superior country where he'd been raised. He'd always liked autumn best of the four seasons, although he missed the dry, cold, white snow-months that followed. Sometimes he'd gone on week-long trips then, cutting school and setting off through the birch woods on skis, with a bedroll and rifle on his back:

The valley narrowed as it rose towards the crest of the Eola Hills, where they broke in a steep slope towards the lowlands around the little town of Rickreall. Orchards gave way to vineyards spindly and bare, with a few red-gold leaves still clinging, and more littering the ground. The vines had been there before the Change, when this area was the Larsson family's country estate; great-grandpa Larsson had bought it back a century ago, when he made his pile out of wheat and timber. The big pillared brick house beyond would have been visible then:

Now the narrowing V was blocked by a steep-sided earthwork bank covered in turf, with a moat at its base full of sharpened angle iron. They'd started on that late in the first Change Year, right after the core of the Bearkillers arrived on their long trek from Idaho; he'd been flying the Larssons to their ranch in Idaho on that memorable March seventeenth, and ended up crash-landing in a half-frozen mountain creek in the Selway-Bitterroot National Wilderness. Which had been a stroke of luck, nerve-wracking though it had been at the time to have the engine cut out over those granite steeps.

"What's that saying Juney uses?" Havel asked. With a grin: "Pardon me, Lady Juniper, herself herself."

"Something pretentiously Gaelic which boils down to saying a man's home is his castle," Signe said, a very slight waspish note in her voice.

"Yeah, but it's true in English too," Havel pointed out, looking pridefully ahead. "We've got a hell of a lot done in a decade, considering we can't use powered machinery."

A wall topped the mound, thirty feet high and built like a hydro dam; rocks the size of a man's head and bigger in a concrete matrix, around a hidden framework of welded steel I-beams salvaged from construction sites in Salem, the old state capital thirty miles northeastward. Round towers half as high again studded it at hundred-yard intervals as it curved away on either side to encompass the whole of the little plateau that held Larsdalen.

Gotta get the inner keep finished before spring, he reminded himself. Work on fortifications was another thing that they did in wintertime: Although there's always fifteen different things we should be doing with every spare moment. Everything done meant something else nearly as urgent sidelined; one thing that seemed universally true in the Changed world was that all work took a lot longer or cost more or both.

The gate where road met wall was four towers grouped together on the corners of a blockhouse, with his flag flying high above each. The drawbridge was down, but the outer gates were closed. They were steel as well, a solid mass of welded beams faced on either side with quarter-inch plate and probably impossible to duplicate now that the hoarded oxyacetylene tanks were empty. The surface was dark brown paint, but this year for swank they'd added a great snarling bear's head in ruddy copper covered in clear varnish, face-on to the roadway with half on either leaf. The Mackenzies had something similar on the gates of Dun Juniper, though they used the Triple Moon and the head of the Horned Man.

Trumpets blared from above. Astrid brought her Arab forward on dancing hooves, throwing up one hand in greeting.

"Who comes to Larsdalen gate?" the officer of the guard called down formally.

"The Bear Lord returns to the citadel of the Bearkillers! Open!"

"Open for Lord Bear!"

"Oh, Christ Jesus, how did we let her get away with this bad-movie crap?" Havel said-but under his breath. "And now everyone's used to it and they'd be upset if we insisted on a plain countersign."

"She's the only theatrical impresario in the family," Signe said, also sotto voce. "Every time we did something new, she was there to tell us how to manage the PR. Don't sweat it. After all, she's not home much anymore."

"Ah, well, names are funny things," he said with resignation. "Someone has an impulse and then you're stuck with them. That's why I've got a Karelian pedigree and a Bohunk moniker."

They both chuckled at the old family joke; back in the 1890s one Arvo Myllyharju had arrived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, fresh off an Aland Island square-rigger and looking for a job in the Iron Range. The Czech pay-clerk at the mine had taken one look at the string of Finnish consonants and said: From now on, your name is Havel!

His great-grandson remembered. Though will it make any sense to our kids? he wondered. Finland might as well be Barsoom, to them, and Michigan about the same.

There was a solid chunk: chunk: sound as the heavy beams that secured the gates were pulled back, and a squeal of steel on steel as the great metal portals swung out, salvaged wheels from railcars running along track set into the concrete of the roadway. Winches grated as the portcullis was raised, and the dark tunnel behind suddenly showed gray light at the other end as the identical inner portals went through the same procedure, to reveal a cheering crowd lining the way. The gates were normally kept open anyway in daylight, during peacetime; this was for show. Signe and Havel reined in beside the gate, saluting as the infantry company went by, followed by the lancers. Feet and hooves boomed drumlike on the boards of the drawbridge and echoed through the passage.

Havel looked up as he followed; there were flickers of lantern light through the gratings in the murder-holes above, and a scent of hot oil bubbling in great pivot-mounted tubs.

"Always thought we could save some effort with those," he said. "Sort of wasteful, all that cooking oil, and burning all that fuel, when all it does is sit there and simmer."

"They've got to be kept hot," Signe said.

"Yeah, but we could do French-fries in 'em. Maybe onion rings too : "

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon

December 15th, 2007/Change Year 9

There was a chorus of giggles from the sixteen-year-olds preparing their choir at the other end of the great Hall. One of them sang in a high, clear tenor: